


walk on off to a whole new plan

by Edoro



Series: the universe is shaped exactly like the earth [1]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, M/M, Major Character Undeath (Miraculous Survival Style), Multi, Other, Plot With Porn, The Gunslinger - Rewrite, Threesome - M/M/M, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-10-31 18:13:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17854637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: Ka's wheel turns. The Turtle sings. All things serve the fuckin' Beams.(On another level of the Tower, things go a little differently. When Roland stands on the edge of the great Mohaine Desert, closer than he's ever been to the man in black, he doesn't stand alone.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to The Dark Tower Rewrite: What If Roland's Besties Were Alive And Also They Were All Kinda Gay. We got plot, we got porn, we got it all.
> 
> As of this publication date, I am about 2/3 of the way through the rewrite of Drawing of the Three. I intend to publish one chapter per week until I run out of written material. 
> 
> This installment does not contain much in the way of violence, gore, death, or the assorted types of bad shit commonly found in a Stephen King work; mostly there's just porn and plot, plot and porn. Future installments will have canon-typical everything and, in the interest of keeping the tag section from being 500 words long, I will be putting detailed content notes in individual chapters.

“Roland,” Alain said when they crested the lip of the valley and stopped, looking down at the inglorious huddle of Tull. “This is a bad place.”

His voice was tight with pain but otherwise rock steady. It was the first any of them had spoken in some hours. This bleak and parched land had dried up even Cuthbert’s endless stream of words, though he did still whistle as they walked.

“Say you so?” Roland asked, almost mildly. If Alain - strong in the touch as a boy and fearsome in his aptitude now, at the end of the hard decades behind them - said such a thing, Roland knew it to be worth listening to. Whether or not he would change their course on such a premonition was less sure, but it cost him naught to listen and might cost him much not to. Had cost him much, in bygone days.

“I do.” 

“Has he been here?” They all knew who Roland meant, just as they all already knew the answer. The asking of it had become a ritual, independent of any sense it made or didn’t make.

“He has.”

“Then we go.” And like that, it was decided.

“I shudder,” Cuthbert said thoughtfully as they made their way down the incline towards the ramshackle little collection of buildings, “to think what makes this place worse than any of the other ones we’ve been through lately, Al. Remember that place - what was it called? Kash, that’s it - remember  _ that _ hole? Three buildings, and I use that term generously, and a dead horse, and they called it a town. I don’t think even a good fire could have fixed that place, though it surely had sore need of one.”

“This one is worse,” Alain said, in a final sort of way. They walked the rest of the way down into Tull in silence.

\---

Halfway down, Alain started humming  _ Hey Jude _ and thumping the end of his heavy walking stick down with the rhythm. He did it in an unconscious, absent sort of way which suggested he wasn’t entirely aware he was doing it, which was probably true. He picked things up like that sometimes.

The hour was late and most of the shops were shuttered and dark, but there were a few folk still there to see the gunslingers approach. These few regarded them with flat faces and wary eyes. Cuthbert gazed around with bright interest, waving a cheery hello to the tailor and his client, both stopped to stare out the window at the strangers, though he didn’t get a greeting back. Hadn’t expected one either, in truth. These were grass-eaters if ever he’d seen such, and not like to welcome such visitors as they’d received.

Tull had a ramshackle look to it. In the dark he couldn’t tell how peeling or unpainted the building facades might be, but darkness couldn’t hide the way they leaned together nor the way the swayback way the roofs dipped. What little could be seen in the light of the oil lanterns lining the main street - simply a wide, dusty rut through the middle of town - did not improve his impression.

The hostler’s looked better than some, but it, too, was clearly barely hanging on. Sustained by the carriage traffic, no doubt, though who’d want to head to Tull Cuthbert could not begin to guess. 

The hostler himself, roused to put up their mule, grinned at Roland like a rabid dog, lips curling back from his yellowed teeth, and took Roland’s coin - tossed so casually, as if gold meant nothing to him - with the open cozening resentment of a man who knew he’d die poor in the bitter dust of the place he’d grown from. A grass-eater indeed, one aware of who and what he was but helpless to rise above it.

Cuthbert looked away from Roland’s dealing with the hostler and scoped what else he could see of the town. Sad and sagging and tired, all of it. Nothing much recommended itself to his eye. He saw hardly another human face, until his gaze settled on a trio of urchins shooting marbles in the shadow of a porch. They didn’t look likely in the least, but not a one of them wanted to talk to the hostler any longer than necessary.

While Roland arranged for their mule to be seen to - however long the creature might last - Cuthbert slipped away to speak to the urchins. “Good evening,” he greeted the trio of sullen faces, tipping them an avuncular grin. “Know any of you where a man might get a bite to eat and perhaps a room to sleep in?”

Sullen silence, none of them wanting to speak to this strange man. It wasn’t just in Tull that this happened, no. The land from which they’d come had been dust in the wind for time untold and they were strangers now, all three, everywhere they went. Folk smelled it on them, saw it in their eyes, heard it in the voices which still held the sound of the long-gone Inner Baronies.

Finally one of the boys spoke up, though it was obvious from the tightening of the other two faces that he’d suffer for it in a moment. “Might be you could get a burger at Sheb’s,” he muttered. “Maybe an empty crib too.”

Cuthbert - who never forgot a name or a face if he could help it - started when the name  _ Sheb _ fell from the unfortunate urchin’s lips. He gained control of himself quickly, and thanked the unfortunate child, but it was there, though few would have noticed.

Alain had; a curling, questioning tendril of his awareness brushed against Cuthbert’s mind, though he still stood silent and solid at Roland’s side.  _ Later _ , Cuthbert sent to him.

Lucky Roland hadn’t been there to hear it. He came clumping over but a moment later, thumbs hooked in his belt, to see what Cuthbert was up to.

“Found us a place to eat and stay the night,” Cuthbert told him, neglecting to mention the name. Maybe Roland would hear it, maybe not. They’d deal with that when it came; Cuthbert was in no hurry to stir up the memories attached to that name, not one bit. Years and years it had been, miles and wheels, but Roland didn’t tend to let things go.

He was not surprised to hear, as they approached the bar, a raucous chorus of drunks singing  _ Hey Jude _ to the accompaniment of a poorly tuned piano.

From the outside the bar was a wearily slumped and wind-scoured building, promising little and less. The first step through the door gave truth to the outer facade’s promises. It was a sour and tired place, a riot of cacophonous sound and smell, with as much charm as the hardscrabble landscape from which it rose.

Silence spread throughout the place at their entrance. They made an arresting enough sight: three hard men wearing hard calibers on their hips, battle-scarred and dusty from their long travels. 

Roland glanced around the room and then strode to the bar with apparent lack of concern. Alain and Cuthbert settled into a corner from which they could watch most of the bar, to let Roland deal as he would. They’d watch the denizens of Tull watching Roland and see what they saw.

Alain sat gingerly, tilted in his chair with his lame right leg stretched out stiff and straight under the table. Under the red sun-flush - he had ever been the palest of the three of them, and burned where Roland and Cuthbert simply browned - his face had a greyish cast to it, and it was apparent now, in the relative coolness of nighttime, that the sweat standing at his brow and temples wasn’t just from the heat. No doubt his knee was screaming.

Cuthbert dropped easily into his own chair, putting Alain on his blind side, and looked first and with especial attention to the piano player. Many and many-a it had been, and the years had not been any kinder to Sheb than to the three of them, but it was the same man. He’d set his watch and warrant by it: this Sheb was the same man who’d tapped out the same plonking honky-tonk tunes so long ago in Hambry.

He nudged an elbow into Alain’s ribs. “The piano man,” he said sidemouth, letting his eyes glide right over the man, neither pausing too long nor noticeably avoiding him. “Does that ugly mug look familiar to you?”

“Familiar,” Al said, a frown in his voice though his face stayed steady. “Yes. Who?”

“Remember Hambry? The Traveller’s Rest, with that grotesque mutie elk over the bar? He played there too.” Cuthbert sniffed. “Doesn’t seem that time has improved his skills any, does it? I don’t think Roland realizes.”

Alain gave a single, slow nod. “Then I don’t think we ought to tell him.” 

“No? I came to much the same conclusion, though I don’t like to think of what might happen should he remember and realize we didn’t tell him.” Or realize  _ Cuthbert _ hadn’t told him, though there was precious little that Cuthbert knew which Alain did not. It was Cuthbert, though, who had the memory for faces.

Alain shrugged his round shoulders. “If he does, then he does. No need to borrow trouble.”

That was true enough, and a close echo of Cuthbert’s own earlier thoughts, though he did not quite have Alain’s sense of placid acceptance. He’d fret about it, he knew, until Roland either realized or they left this place, while Alain would simply put it aside until or unless it had to be dealt with.

Before he could raise any further concerns or try to argue himself into saying something, the barmaid came carefully over, balancing two plates and a couple of heavy-bottomed mugs. The plates were piled with greasy, pink-edged burgers, the mugs full of dark and foamy beer. A king’s feast it was not, but welcome all the same after days of traveling rations.

“Thankee sai,” the both of them chorused, Alain quietly and Cuthbert with a grin.

Her hand dove into a pocket and came out holding an iron key, which she set on the edge of the table. “Your friend rented the two of you a room. First floor, first to the left of the stairs.” As she spoke, she glanced the two of them over, and then her eyes stopped - as they so often did - on Cuthbert’s face.

Some wouldn’t look him in the face at all. Some tried not to stare but did it anyway, looking back over and over again in little darting bursts. The barmaid stared frankly, and then shifted her gaze to his good eye once she’d gotten her fill.

“No trouble, y’understand?” She tried to sound severe, but only managed nervous. If any of these hard men come into her bar tried to cause trouble, there wasn’t a thing she or anyone else in town could do to stop them.

“No trouble,” Cuthbert promised her, pressing his hand to his heart. “We’re only weary and harmless travellers, sai, that we are.”

The look she gave him suggested she didn’t believe it, but she said no more on the subject and went back on her way.

They ate and drank in silence… and watched. There was a hostile feeling in the bar, one Cuthbert didn’t need the touch to pick up on. When could any man in here hope to afford a dinner for three? When had any of them last eaten or drunk so well? What man could live in such a hopeless place as this, barely more than a wide place in the road, and watch someone come in throwing around gold and the accents of the long-gone Inner Baronies and not feel red murder in his heart?

Some of the townsmen were large and some of them had knives. Cuthbert watched one shift in his chair, then dart a glance towards his and Alain’s little corner and settle back. Maybe if Roland had come in alone, he might have tried his luck. It wouldn’t have served him any better had Roland been alone than had Roland been with a dozen other men; a gunslinger alone would be more than the equal of anyone in this town.

He’d taken note, in an idle sort of way, of the drunk asleep by the door when they came in. Such men were more like fixtures than patrons in such establishments, and not like to cause trouble. He did not, however, see that man get up from his spot. His attention was still fixed on the big fellow who looked as if he might want to start a fight, his head craned sharply because the man was on his blind side.

The sudden hush that descended, though - he heard that. And he felt Alain grab his arm, squeezing urgently.

“Look,” Alain hissed.

Cuthbert looked. A man, in more disrepair than the rest of the sorry folk in the bar, went reeling across the room and dropped a hand onto Roland’s shoulder. He was scrawny as a signpost, wrapped in dirty and poorly mended clothes. What harm he could do their friend Cuthbert had no idea, but Alain was staring at him about hard enough to set him afire and squeezing Cuthbert’s arm hard enough to bruise.

“Al, what -” Cuthbert started, but then stopped short, because the man - this man out on the edge of the world long past any civilized place, this man who’d staggered past them wafting the stench of piss and devilweed behind him - spoke to Roland in the High Speech of Gilead.

Little enough did any of the three of them hear that! Even from each other, these days, they hardly heard it! Cuthbert would have sooner expected it from the mouth of a dog than anyone in this benighted place.

“A piece of gold?” he asked Roland in speech that might well have been understood by no other man in the world, besides the three of them… and one other. “Just for a pretty?”

As dumbfounded as they were, Roland handed the man his piece of gold. He held it up to the light, then turned to clump and sway back to his table to admire it. On his way back, the two of them saw his face. Saw his  _ eyes. _ Not so close as Roland had, thank the gods for that, but close enough to see how they were empty dug-out mineshafts stretching straight on down to hell.

Beside him, Alain drew in a sharp breath. His fingers dug even more savagely into Cuthbert’s arm. 

Once the man sat down, the bar rapidly emptied. It wasn’t quite a stampede, but close enough. After the last of them had gone the doors kept swinging creakily back and forth, hinges squealing. The barmaid stood staring after them, fists on her hips, then turned her tongue on Roland, as if it were his own fault the men of this town were yellow.

The astonishing man who’d caused the scene, meanwhile, simply sat back down at his table and played with the gold for a time.

“There’s something wrong with that man,” Alain said, so low as to be barely audible. “He feels like death.”

“He looks like a man with one foot in the clearing and the other off the path, yes.”

“No,” Alain said, shaking his head impatiently. “Not dead or dying.  _ Death. _ He’s not sick, he’s poison. Touching him is like - like sticking my hand in a puddle of acid.”

More than once Cuthbert had found himself envious of his friends. Mostly Roland - always best, always first, always so sure, with such true and deep steel at the heart of him. Of Alain’s touch, though, he had never been jealous. During some of the worst times during those years of blood and fire and ruin during and after the fall of Gilead, he’d thanked the gods to have been born as touchblind as anyone else.

Now was one of those times it seemed more curse than blessing. He pried Alain’s hand off his arm, gently as he could - Alain barely seemed to notice - and looked at the man, who’d gone to sleep once more. A sorry fellow he looked, deep in the grip of the weed and not long for this world, but not in the least dangerous. Cuthbert was accustomed, of course, to being one of the most dangerous people in any room, but he thought a determined child could have made short work of this particular man.

Up behind the bar, the woman burst into sudden tears. Cuthbert’s head jerked that way. Roland murmured a few words to her, then turned his back and went to his friends. She stood with her hands over her face a few moments more, and then her crying ended as suddenly as it had started. Almost angrily, she wiped her face dry, and then set to putting the bar to rights.

“Roland,” Alain said urgently, as soon as he was near. “That man -”

“Queer, isn’t he?” Roland eyed the man’s sleeping form with a tight, humorless smile. “I believe he is a trap of some sort, set by the man we seek. What say you?”

“Yes,” Alain breathed. “Oh, yes. He’s very dangerous.”

“Yes.” Roland inclined his head in a single solemn nod. “Allie - yon barmaid - will tell me about him. She saw our man as well, and that she’ll tell me too.”

“How friendly she’s come over, all of a sudden,” Cuthbert said. Behind Roland’s back she was still tidying, shooting glances at them every so often. “Why is that, I wonder?”

“You two go to the room,” Roland said, not deigning to notice that question. “I’ll be in to wake you in the morning and discuss whatever it is Allie tells me. Mayhap there’ll be a clue in it.” Whether Allie knew anything of note or not he was not sure, the look on his face said, but he’d hear it out regardless. When it came to the man they sought, Roland left no stone unturned.

“Ahh,” said Cuthbert, who had known quite well how Roland was going to get his information and simply could not resist tweaking him about it. “Dipping a toe into the oldest profession, are you? T’was a time that would have been my job, but the world has moved on since then and taken my looks with it, and what a shame it is I’m alive to see the day Roland Deschain is the handsomest of my friends. Yon woman and I might be more well-matched, at that.”

“Bert,” Roland said, almost mildly but clearly in no mood for it.

“Cry your pardon. I wish you joy of her, truly. I’ll be bunking with a handsomer fellow, in truth, so I’m not put out any.”

This time it was Alain who said his name, plenty reproachfully. “Let’s go,” Alain said, “and leave them to it.” He gripped the edge of the table and hauled himself out of his seat, getting his bad leg under him mostly, Cuthbert believed, through sheer force of will. Most of his weight he leaned on his stick, a stout thing made of ghostwood, banded with iron at the bottom and wrapped with leather around the grip. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Roland echoed, nodding.

“Tomorrow,” Cuthbert agreed.

\---

The room was dark and narrow, indeed little more than a crib. Like as not it was one, just without a whore to occupy it. Even such a venerable profession as that couldn’t have much of a presence in Tull.

Still, Alain lowered himself to sit on the shadowy bulk of the bed as gratefully as if it were the finest appointed room in the great castle where he’d been raised. 

They’d been weeks on the road with no better accommodations than the odd abandoned shack here or barn there. If luck were with them the barn would be owned and therefore filled with hay they could lay upon. More and more of late, it had not been. 

The wasteland stretching before them was a place of not only physical but spiritual desolation as well. Of that Alain was very certain. What they were approaching was in some vital way the end of the world itself. He’d been dreaming it for months and now he felt it during his waking hours, and never before so strongly as he did here in Tull, this last little outcropping of civilization - if it could be called that - clinging to the edge of emptiness. Beyond it would be even less than there was behind them.

So Alain was grateful for the dirty room and grateful for the narrow bed with its musty sheets. He was grateful for however many nights he’d have sleeping somewhere softer than the rough ground, and most especially grateful for the prospect of a morning where he might awaken no more than ordinarily stiff and aching, rather than feeling as if someone had cut his knee and hip open in the night and sewn them back up full of hot coals.

“What charming accommodations we’ve been given,” Cuthbert said in a grand tone, once he’d found and kindled the single oil lamp sitting on a battered table beside the bed. Its uneven, flickering light hardly improved matters. “Why, I think were I to stand in the center of the room, I might not be able to touch both walls! And look there -” this said pointing at the far corner of the ceiling - “at what large spiders we have! The fattest in the whole place, I wot.”

“Probably,” Alain agreed absently. He was paying little attention to Bert, but rather looking down at his feet with the grimly set face of a man facing an unpleasant but necessary chore.

With a bellyful of food and a mug of good hard beer - that, at least, was good in Tull, and no surprise that - buzzing gently on top of it, all Alain wanted was to lay back and close his eyes and wait for the howling of his leg to subside enough that he could fall asleep. At the very least, though, he knew he ought to take his boots off. 

His left knee still bent just fine, so he’d start with that boot, he resolved, and see where it led him. Mayhap he could toe the other off with his bare foot. He bent to it with a grunt, and nearly cracked his forehead against the top of Cuthbert’s head when Cuthbert knelt suddenly between his feet.

“Let me get that for you,” Cuthbert said, and then added with a wicked grin, to take the sting of pity from his words, “for no perfume is so sweet to me as your feet after a hard day’s walking, by my watch and warrant.”

“Well then,” Alain said, leaning back, far too tired to protest the act of kindness, “feast your nose, I’ll not deny you.” 

At another time he might have insisted on doing it himself. At another time Cuthbert might not have offered, even, but this was part of their khef, that Cuthbert knew when he was too tired and hurting too much to argue and therefore needed the help.

Boots off, Cuthbert did not rise, but cheerily insisted, “Pants too, my good fellow!” Before Alain could muster a response to that, Cuthbert’s quick hands had his belt unbuckled. He raised his eyebrows, but obligingly shucked his jeans down off his hips anyway. 

Cuthbert didn’t demand he strip further, but merely knelt there at his feet, hands resting high up on his legs. Not quite so high as his crotch, but close enough to make him imagine if it were just a little closer. He brushed his thumbs lightly back and forth over the insides of Alain’s thighs, callused skin whispering over the thin cotton of his undershorts, and looked up, and said, for once, nothing.

Alain met his grinning gaze evenly. The oil lamp threw lurid orange light across the left side of his face, setting shadows to dance in the ghastly darkness of his empty eye socket. 

It was surely not the worst of the wounds he’d taken during that long-ago battle on Jericho Hill, surely not the one that’d come closest to killing him, but it was ugly all the same. The bullet had hit him at an angle, shattering his cheekbone and eye socket and obliterating the eye within, and then gone on to smash through the bridge of his nose, bisect his right brow, and dig a bone-deep furrow all the way to his temple. 

He’d been lucky. If the gunman’s aim had been any more true, even by an inch, the bullet would have blown his brains right out the side of his head.

Alain reached down to cup the side of his friend’s face, and rubbed his thumb gently over the edge of the wound. He’d not been there on the hill that day, nor seen when Cuthbert had been shot. He’d lain senseless with pain and blood loss in a thin copse of scrawny trees and high yellow grass, all but dead to the world (and perilously near dead, period), while his friends fought and bled and, most of them, died on Jericho Hill. It had been quite a shock, coming back to lucidity and seeing that bloody, bruised hole in Cuthbert’s face.

Cuthbert leaned into the touch, his remaining eye narrowing to a slit. “Struck dumb by my good looks, are you?” he murmured, warm lips moving against Alain’s hand. He turned his head a little more and pressed a kiss into the center of his palm, dry save for the teasing flick of wet tongue at the very end.

“Always,” Alain said with a slight smile. It was true, and the bare honesty of it flustered Cuthbert - who was not so bad as Roland, no, but still tended to talk circles around his own feelings - as he’d known it would.

He drew his hand back, stroking the pads of his fingers across the soft skin of Cuthbert’s face just to watch the way his eyelid fluttered the rest of the way down. “Now get you up, now, and come to bed. I’m much too tired for fooling tonight, you randy boy.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Cuthbert rose with an easy grace that Alain, who had once been called Thudfoot before ever he’d been lamed, couldn’t help but envy and admire in equal measure. He pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it carelessly to the floor, then shucked his pants and shorts down as well and stepped out of them.

Then he pointed an imperious finger at Alain’s face. “Mark me very well,” he said, “I’m a  _ man, _ not a boy, and too tired myself to be randy.” Then, mother naked, he put his arms up above his head and stretched like a cat, more, Alain thought, to put his own body on display than out of any real need to. 

“Cry your pardon, gunslinger,” Alain said. Tired he might be, but not so much so he couldn’t eye the long arch of Cuthbert’s body appreciatively up and down.

“I’ll grant it,” Cuthbert allowed, “but only if you’ll get your shirt off as well.”

That Alain could do. It had been too long by far since they’d been able to sleep together in such privacy, skin to skin. What fooling they’d done along the road was of the quick and fumbling variety, clothing pushed and pulled aside but not off, and they slept fully dressed. 

The bed was a narrow fit for the two of them, even with how skinny Cuthbert was. They managed, though, Alain mostly on his back with his bad leg stretched carefully out and his hip and shoulder bumping the rough wooden wall, while Cuthbert curled into his side, head on his shoulder.

Bert gave the lie to his own claim of fatigue almost immediately. He nuzzled at Alain’s neck, at just the spot he knew was so sensitive to the touch of his lips and his warm breath, and sent the hand he wasn’t lying on roaming up and down Alain’s bare chest, fingertips dragging through the tight golden curls there. Once or twice he tweaked a nipple, just glancingly enough to pretend it wasn’t deliberate. He shifted, too, restlessly, and squeezed his legs together, on the very verge of squirming.

This close, skin on skin, it took more effort to keep out of Bert’s mind than to touch it. So Alain could feel good and well the needy heat of desire in his belly, source of his restlessness, and could see the fantasies flickering through Bert’s mind as clear as his own thoughts.

“Too tired to be randy, I thought you said,” Alain said after a time.

“I’ve an itch,” Cuthbert replied with great dignity, “‘tis all. I’d go down on my knees pretty as you please and ask Roland to scratch it for me, but he’s busy with his new gilly girl, is he not? Although, say - you don’t think she’d like two gunslingers in her bed, would she? Or perhaps like to watch the two of us? No, I’ll not interrupt them tonight, not on their honeymoon. Mayhap I’ll scratch it myself. You wouldn’t begrudge me that, would you?”

With an exasperated groan, Alain shifted onto his side so Cuthbert could lay flat and ran one broad hand swiftly down his body, over his chest and flat belly, to cup his mound and press his fingers down between his legs where he so obviously wanted to be touched.

To his absolute lack of surprise, he found Cuthbert already wet. Slowly, he ran his finger the length of his slit, dipping between his lips to spread the slickness around.

Cuthbert’s breath caught in his throat. He hiked one leg up and tilted his hips to open himself up to Alain’s touch as much as possible, even as he breathlessly said, “You needn’t do that if you don’t want to. I meant it when I said I’d take care of it myself.”

As close as they were, Alain didn’t need words to tell Cuthbert that he  _ did _ want. Lovely as it would be to lay beside Cuthbert as it pleasured himself, he wanted to touch. He simply set to work, pressing and stroking slowly with one finger while he pressed his thoughts into Cuthbert’s mind with the touch.

He was thinking of the sweet slick heat between Cuthbert’s legs and how good it would feel to be inside of him - a wordless image of Cuthbert seated astride his hips, rocking on his cock while he rubbed at the tight nub at the top of his slit with his thumb, ‘til Cuthbert shuddered in climax atop him - and he was thinking of the longstick carefully wrapped at the bottom of Cuthbert’s pack and the cunning leather harness that went around his hips and held it strapped to his body and of being bent over this very bed, filled full with the cold stone length of it, squirming and grinding himself against the rough sheets while Cuthbert fucked him -

and he thought of how he wanted to do all that and more, for the gods only knew when they might have such luxuries as a room and a bed again, but his body was too tired and hurting too badly to be roused, even when he felt Cuthbert’s pleasure, magnified by the sharing of his own desires.

It didn’t take long. A minute, perhaps two, and then Cuthbert gasped his name and shuddered, thighs squeezing tight around his wrist, and the tight bundle of slick flesh beneath his fingertip spasmed. Alain rubbed him through it and then kept on. His second climax came even quicker, and once it was done Cuthbert grabbed his arm and pulled his hand away.

This time when they settled back into their former positions, Cuthbert flopped bonelessly against Alain, one arm draped across him, and didn’t move save for his heavy breathing. Alain savored the stillness, and even more the heavy blanket of satiation which had fallen over Cuthbert’s thoughts.

He was nearly asleep - and had thought Bert asleep for some time already - when Cuthbert spoke up.

“Al,” he said, in a thick and slightly slurry voice, “tomorrow, when we speak to Roland…”

“Mmm?” He didn’t like to be reminded of that talk, for the man they’d left below was the subject, the weed-eater whose mind felt like death. If he thought too closely on the man he could  _ feel _ him, a sucking cold void beneath them.

“I want to tell him about the piano man. I think we should.” Cuthbert raised his hand and patted at Alain’s chest. 

That Bert had successfully convinced himself into telling was no surprise, though Alain liked it not just the same. “I think it’ll only cause trouble if we do,” he said. He wasn’t sure, but he had a strong feeling. The painful events of that Reaptide in Hambry were old, old memories, but it was not a subject Roland tended to be reasonable about. “Besides, we oughtn’t stay long. No point bringing it back up just to leave in a day or two.”

“If he figures it out and finds out we knew and didn’t tell him…”

“I’ll say ‘twas my idea,” Alain said firmly. “I’ll say I had a feeling it would end badly. Now go to  _ sleep _ , Bert.”

That answer didn’t satisfy Cuthbert, he could tell, but there was no more talk on the subject, and at last the both of them fell asleep. Skin to skin, they shared uneasy dreams.


	2. Chapter 2

For the last few weeks, the rotten ache throbbing up and down his leg had woken Alain in the dim grey hours of morning, almost always before the sun rose. That day in Tull he woke aching and stiff with morning light pouring in through the dusty windowpane, feeling more rested than he had in a long time. He’d dreamed troubled dreams, but they faded away like morning mist under the rising sun as he woke, leaving him with only a handful of vague and disquieting images - a trail of bodies stretching out into the scrub wastes, an empty town, the sound of a man screaming. Might be it was something that was going to happen, or might happen, or would have happened. If it came again he might know better, but if he chased after it he was sure to lose what little thread he’d kept.

So he laid in bed for a time, looking up at the bare wooden beams of the ceiling and letting his mind wander. Out of habit he reached first for Roland, and found him awake and well. 

He felt the woman as well. Her mind was full of longings and fear and resentment all braided together like a rope. He didn’t touch her too deeply, for it gave him a vague sort of sadness. They couldn’t give her what she wanted, nor bring her anything but grief.

Even at this time of day there were folk in the bar below. Like as not, getting drunk and playing Watch Me was the chief occupation for many of the men of Tull. Alain’s awareness flitted from one to the other, never dipping too deep but merely skimming at the surface layers of thought. There was something rotten at the center of this town, something strange and hostile buried buzzing in the minds of all its folk.

He’d be glad to have it behind him this coming evening, bed or no bed.

Pleasant as such drifting was, eventually the pressure in his bladder forced him up. As soon as he stirred, Cuthbert awoke and sat up with a sleepy murmur, squinting at him. 

“Move,” Alain said. “Need to piss.”

Cuthbert swung out of bed and into a back-cracking stretch, yawning prodigiously. “Take me along to the backhouse then, unless you were planning to do it out the window?”

“I wasn’t.” Smiling to himself, Alain bent to pull his pants on. Despite his anatomical limitations, he had no doubt that Bert would happily try such a thing, just to see if he could. It was quite a mental image.

By the time he’d gotten his pants done up and his boots on - slowly and with difficulty, but by himself, for he wasn’t half so stiff or sore as he’d been last night - Cuthbert was fully dressed and preening as best he could, peering at his reflection in the smoky window glass and combing his fingers through his hair.

“Come,” Alain said, “it’s down ‘round back.” Such places were often built similarly, and on top of that, he had a knack for finding his way around places even when he’d only just arrived.

The backhouse was as evil-smelling and poorly maintained a place as Alain had expected. He did his business quickly, holding his breath, and hoped he wouldn’t encounter a scorpion in the foul-smelling darkness. He pitied Cuthbert, who had to actually skim his pants down and squat over the seat.

Allie was back behind the bar when they came back in, though there was no sign of Roland anywhere in the saloon. She caught Alain’s eye with a strange look, face hard but eyes lost, almost hurt. He hardly had to touch her to feel her desperation for Roland to stay and her surety that he and his strange companions would be moving on soon. It rolled off her in miserable waves.

Cuthbert waggled his fingers at her in a dandyish wave. She turned to make pretend at straightening something on the wall.

“Friendly, she is,” he said to Alain. “I can only imagine what a warm welcome Roland found last night.”

“She’s lonely,” Alain murmured back. “She wants him to stay.” Still, he couldn’t feel  _ too _ sorry for her. Their leaving would bring her grief, but their staying would bring only more of the same. 

The weed-eater wasn’t present in the saloon, but Alain could feel him in the town like an infected tooth sitting in his mouth, throbbing even when it wasn’t being prodded or jostled. Every moment he spent in Tull convinced him further that they needed to get gone as soon as possible.

Roland was waiting in their room when they came back, peering out the window at the hardpack street below.

“Hile, Roland!” Cuthbert called. He dropped into a posture of sprawling ease on the bed, one leg hooked over the other, looking as perfectly at home in the rough room as he would have anywhere else. “What’s caught your fancy down below? There are so many beautiful sights here in gorgeous Tull, I can’t hardly imagine which you’re feasting your eyes on now. Shall we all go have a wander and see what new treasures we might unearth?”

“Perhaps so.” Roland turned to them with a faintly distracted look, as if he were contemplating some difficult problem. The problem of the man in black, no doubt, and the trap he’d left here for them. “I think I’d like us to take a look around, yes, and see what we may. But we have other matters to speak of first.”

“That man,” Alain said immediately. “The weed-eater.” It wasn’t often he was impatient. Of Tull as a whole, he didn’t much care; the town was a wind-draggled waste, a wide place in the road, and of no consequence to them. That weed-eater, though, had scared him badly. As with all truly terrible experiences, his memory of that fear was but a shadow of what he’d felt - but whenever he thought of it, a cold finger traced its way down his spine. 

“Yes,” Roland said. “His name is Nort. Allie tells me he died and the man we seek came in during his wake and brought him back.”

There that cold finger was again, not merely tracing the line of his spine this time but clawing down it. That they pursued a powerful sorcerer was known to all the three of them; that he could pull back the soul of a man who’d gone beyond the clearing, who’d died and lain dead for hours or days…

And what might such a man have seen, on his way back from the land of the dead? What might such a man know? There was a terrible, almost seductive fascination in that question. 

Alain had been born with a natural talent for the touch. He was no born scholar - Cuthbert might have been, had he the patience, and Jamie DeCurry had been, but he had ever been slow when it came to reading and to understanding the shape of new ideas. In that way, he was much like Roland.

However, he’d been born with that talent, and because he was the son of a gunslinger of Gilead rather than a farmer’s boy, he had trained all his life to hone his natural gift. He’d read books, some of them quite rare. He’d sought instruction in the mystical arts from as many sources as he could find. He’d spent a year with the Manni-folk as a boy. 

Arrogance was not in him; there was no doubt in his mind that there were many in the world who surpassed him. All the same, he knew - as simply and easily as he knew the sun in the sky - that he knew more of  _ thought _ and  _ mind _ than most folk he’d ever meet.

And now, was there placed before him a chance to learn more? To peer beyond a veil most men only got to see through once, and only when they had no more use of the knowledge? If he went to the formerly dead man and asked to hear the awful secrets that none should know and still be able to speak of, might he be told?

He thought that he might. It would drive him mad, of course, but the terrifying thing was that no small part of him reckoned madness might not be such a high price to pay for such knowledge.  No, it might not be at all.

“And are they sure,” Cuthbert asked, “that this fellow was truly dead? Not that I’d doubt the medical elite of Tull, here, perish the thought! Only I don’t know that they even have a barber, and I wouldn’t trust the fellow to so much as pull a rotten tooth if they did, I would not. Mayhap he laid down for a nap and some folk took a fright, him looking like something dug up out of a grave already, and -”

“He was dead,” Roland said. “He was dead, and the man in black brought him back. He left Allie a note, a word to speak to Nort, should she ever want to know the secrets of the grave. So -”

“Oh,” Cuthbert interrupted brightly, “what’s the word?”

Roland shot him a forbidding look. “I won’t tell you that. Like as not you’d say it to the man just to see if it was true.”

“Oh, come now, Roland! You may think me foolish, and I’ll owe as that’s likely true, but I’m no idiot. Nor have I any interest in being mad.” But the magpie glitter of his single dark eye told a different story. Quick and clever Cuthbert was, but he was also unfailingly curious, and seemed at times - even still, after all these years - to have all the sense of a housecat when it came to sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.

Ignoring him, Roland looked at Alain. “So this man Nort is an unholy, accursed thing, and I do believe he’s a trap, but not one set for us.”

“Oh, no,” Alain said, “he’s a trap for us alright. Mayhap not the only one. We ought to leave before we find out.” 

And in his mind’s eye he saw himself making his slow and painful way down the narrow, creaking stairs. He saw himself sitingt at the bar and buying a drink, perhaps a burger, and he saw himself leaning forward and asking with all the grace and pleasantness his mother had ever taught him to speak to a lady with,  _ What’s the word, sai Allie? My friend told me the story of what you told him, of the loaded gun the man in black left you, and Allie, I need to know: what’s the word? Let me hold the gun a second, let me put it to my temple, let me pull the trigger first. What’s the word? _

Only he  _ knew _ . Did it come plucked from Roland’s thoughts, or perhaps the barmaid’s below, or was it simply one of the things that came to him from no one’s mind in particular but rather the aggregate of all the minds thinking all their thoughts around him? He didn’t know where the word had come from, but he knew the word. 

_ Nineteen. _

“I do want to be on our way soon,” Roland said. Horribly, Alain knew he was lying. He might not have known it himself. His reluctance was buried deep, but it was there, and Alain could feel it, a dragging anchor on his words. “Every moment our prey gets farther away. But first I want the three of us to take the measure of the town. Allie spoke of a preacher woman come out of the desert -”

“Roland,” Alain cut in urgently, catching Roland’s pale blue eyes with his own. “ _ We have to leave _ . Hear me, I beg, and listen, for your father’s sake and for the love you bear me.”

His uncharacteristic interruption was enough, at least, to catch Roland’s attention. He struggled now to put his feelings into words that Roland would understand. It was like stepping in a trap and watching as, exquisitely slow, the teeth of it began to raise and clamp shut around your leg, and trying to find words to explain  _ as it was happening _ why you ought to step away.

“This is an evil place,” he said eventually. “The dead man is part of it. Perhaps this preacher woman is another. It’s in all of them, though, and it gets worse the longer we stay here. I can feel it, like…” He flapped one broad hand inarticulately. “It’s no mere bad feeling, you understand. It’s the touch. The dead man is part of it, but not the whole of it. Something terrible awaits us if we stay here.”

A trail of bodies stretching down the main street. Bullet holes like staring red eyes, goggling blindly up at the sullen sky. A man screaming - screaming and screaming and screaming, no words, just screaming. Was that voice known to him? Was that man, perhaps, the man he looked at now?

Roland regarded him solemnly. As always, he would decide what he did, and Alain would bide by his decisions, but Alain hoped fiercely that he listened, that he  _ understood _ .

“You feel there is danger here?” Roland asked finally. “Is it death?”

“Great danger, yes. And death, yes. For us or for the town, I know not, but death is breathing down all our necks here.” A trail of bodies… if death came, he thought it most likely for the town. There were maybe fifty people in all of Tull and not a gun among them. Grass-eaters, the lot of them. Such would not stand against one gunslinger, much less three, even when two of those were crippled.

And why let it go so far? All three of them were soaked in blood - much of it from enemies, plenty more of it from people who simply happened to be in the wrong place or serving the wrong men - but they weren’t harriers. There would be no honor in killing a town like this, nor even purpose or necessity.

Roland rubbed his hand up his cheek, frowning slightly as he thought. It was rare Alain disagreed, rarer still he did it so vehemently. That he did so now held weight, he hoped.

“That I wish for some good enough excuse to ignore your misgivings and stay,” Roland said finally, slowly, with a rueful twist to his mouth, “means I ought not, I think. Today we’ll go about the town and see what else of note there is to see, as well as lay in supplies. Tomorrow morning we will leave. Such a delay may well increase our danger, but we musn’t find ourselves unprepared for the desert.”

Relief washed over Alain, refreshing as clean cold water after a day’s hard travel. “Thank you. I don’t believe another day will doom us, and you say true.”

“I shall weep,” Cuthbert intoned, “to put this lovely place at my back, so I shall.”

“Then best you fill your eyes with the sight of it as much as you can today,” Roland said. “Fill your pack and waterskins while you’re filling your eyes, and fill your ears with what gossip may come to them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Protip: always listen to your psychic friends.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised you a threesome, and here it is.

Roland wanted to visit Allie’s bed for the last time no more than he had the first time. It was not in his nature, however, to slip away like a thief in the night simply to avoid an unpleasant task, and so it did not occur to him to do so. It did occur to him that he needn’t lay with her to tell her he was leaving, but in some vague and distant way he felt sorry for her.

“My companions and I leave tomorrow morning,” he told her simply and without preamble.

“Aye,” she said, not quite masking the tremble in her voice, “I knew you’d be as soon gone as arrived.” Anger and dumb, desperate need warred in her eyes and in her tremulous voice. “Got what ye needed, so now off ye’ll be, to die in that great barren waste. I wish ye joy of it.”

Roland did not point out that she was the one who’d demanded use of his body in return for information. She knew it as well as he did. Her anger was only a way of making the separation easier on herself, and he did not begrudge her that much. Like as not she’d die here in Tull, like as not sometime soon, and if a flash of anger at him made that easier for her to bear, then he could bear it as well.

“I’ll lay with thee tonight,” he told her, and so he did. He didn’t desire her any more than he had the first evening or the morning after, but he did his duty by her.

She climaxed. He did not. He lay beside her for a time, but restlessness crept up his legs and shook him out of her bed sooner than he’d intended.

On his way out of her room, though, he paused, looking over his shoulder. She sat up in her bed, to one side of the spot where they’d lain together, the sheets bunched carelessly around her waist. In the darkness she looked very small and very pale and very sad. She was no one’s mother, no one’s daughter, and now no one’s lover.

“Leave,” he told her.

“What do ye say?” she asked. “Trying to turn me out of my own bed, now?”

“No. Leave this town. Leave Tull.”

“And where,” she asked, her voice thick with scorn, “would I go? When I’ve my own place here, a business I’ve built up with my own two hands all these years? Shall I start over again scrubbing dishes in some man’s kitchen, or washing floors, or rinsing spend out of sheets in a whorehouse?”

Roland thought on it a moment, then shrugged. “I know or care not where you might go. I imagine you’ve a head for business and a nose for opportunity, though, and this is a doomed town.” She was simply staring at him, her face set in stubborn lines. He could have just left. He wanted to just leave. Part of him also wanted to do something good here, to spare her some of the grief that was her life’s portion. “My friend has the touch.”

“Which one?” Now she sounded curious in spite of herself. “The handsome one?”

“The blond one.” Not that it mattered to her which friend he spoke of. “It is at his urging that we depart so soon. You should do the same. Nothing good will come of staying in Tull. Leave and find a place where there are no revenant weed-eaters, and perhaps you’ll live a little longer.”

And that was as much as he cared to try. Either she would take his advice and leave, or - more likely - she would stay here and die a grass-eater’s dull death. It was out of his hands, as so many things were.

Their joining had been a barren prospect from the start, but in light of his departure it felt particularly pointless. Had he known or cared for her better he might have relished these last moments; instead he felt a sense of relief, as of a burden lifted, and a desire to be away. The last bit of business concluded, he walked out of her door without another backward glance.

-

The splintery floorboards creaked wearily under his feet as he left. He considered going down to the bar, perhaps to sit and drink a beer and think on the next course of action, or perhaps to go out the front doors and take a walk around the town. At this late hour, with even the bar closed, he’d likely be the only thing alive out in the streets. Might be that a wander in the dusty moonlight was the cure to the restlessness crawling through him.

His feet had other ideas. They took him down the hall to the top of the narrow stairs and then stopped, right outside the door to his friends’ room. He pushed it open without considering that it might have been locked, and it wasn’t. Should have been, but - perhaps Alain had known, in that way he had of knowing such things, that Roland would be coming by. Perhaps they’d simply figured no one in Tull could surprise them terminally enough to be worth it.

He slipped into the room and eased the door shut behind himself, unnoticed for the moment. They were in bed together, both naked or near enough as made no difference, and absorbed enough with each other not to see him.

Had they been fucking, he likely would have slipped out as quickly and quietly as he’d come in and left them to it. They weren’t, however. They sat in bed, Alain leaning back against the bed’s headboard and Cuthbert in his lap, kissing each other in the leisurely manner one might savor the last good meal one expects to have for a long time. 

Briefly, he thought of the first night he’d spent with both of them. He’d come blundering into their room in much the same way, seeking Cuthbert alone, to find the two of them entwined and very much occupied with each other. For a time he’d stood in the open doorway, open-mouthed and somehow stunned despite knowing full well that they were lovers together before either of them had ever taken up with him, and he might have slipped away and never spoken of it had Cuthbert not opened his eyes and seen him standing there and told him, as sharply as he could under the circumstances, to come into the room and close the gods-be-damned door before every voyeur in the tavern came to peer over his shoulder.

He remembered the way Alain had lifted his head up from between Bert’s legs and looked at him, the way he’d stepped over the threshold of the room and closed the door behind him, the way it’d felt like crossing some invisible line. He’d been terribly nervous. He’d been in terrible need. Before Jericho Hill, that had been, but by no more than a year.

Now he felt no nerves, though as always he had need. It seemed to Roland that the longer they went on, the more desperately he needed them. He leaned back against the door and watched, taking quiet pleasure as he always did in the picture they made together. The flickering flame of the single oil lamp colored them both in bronzey shades of shadow, but the eye of Roland’s mind saw them as they were, Cuthbert with his golden skin, so brown and rich against Alain’s paler complexion, Cuthbert lithe and skinny and angular where Alain was stocky and broad and round. Not soft, no, neither of them - Cuthbert was all lean and rangy muscle, slippery as a weasel, while beneath the padding Alain was solid as a tree trunk.

Cuthbert wound one long-fingered hand through Alain’s buttery curls and pulled his head back, then leaned down to kiss his open mouth. His own hair swung down in a straight, dark curtain, obscuring their faces. One of them made a low sighing sound. 

Alain lifted his hands from Cuthbert’s narrow hips and laid them flat on his shoulders, then stroked slowly down the length of his body, palms flat and fingers spread so his broad hands took up most of the width of Cuthbert’s back. Down his back, all the way to his ass, Cuthbert arching sinuously beneath his touch, and there Alain gripped him to pull him in closer. The headboard creaked under their shifting weight.

One of Alain’s hands slid lower down along Cuthbert’s lean thigh and into the shadowy place between his legs. What exactly his fingers were doing down there Roland couldn’t see, but he could hear the soft slick sounds and see the way Cuthbert’s hand flexed and tightened in Alain’s hair. After a moment he pulled his hand free - fingers glinting wetly in the lamplight - and put it between them to do something else Roland couldn’t see, something which made Cuthbert’s breath stutter and his back arch.

“Oh, Al,” he breathed out, “you’re such a dreadful tease, you know that?”

Roland palmed himself lightly through his jeans, wondering how long it might take them to notice him, wondering if what he wanted was just to stand and watch the two of them together. It felt better, just being in the room. The old worn wood seemed almost homey, the smoky orange light of the lamp almost cozy. He no longer felt the aimless need to be  _ elsewhere.  _ They seemed to be in no great hurry, and neither was he. Time had slipped away at some point, and he felt he could stand and watch them take their leisurely pleasure in each other all night.

“Mmm.” Alain nuzzled forward against Cuthbert’s chest - the hand in his hair was now loosely stroking rather than pulling at it - and did something, with his mouth or his hand or both, that made Cuthbert shudder and blurt out a shaky, breathless laugh.

He mouthed his way up over the bony shelf of Cuthbert’s shoulder and locked eyes with Roland. There was no hint of surprise in his expression. For just a second he held Roland’s gaze, and then he put his mouth against Cuthbert’s ear and murmured something, too low for Roland to hear. Not that he needed to hear to guess what it was.

Cuthbert twisted around and favored Roland with a wide and wicked grin. “Hile, my friend! How long have you been standing there peeping? If t’was a show you wanted, why, you should have said, and we could have given you a much better one!”

It wasn’t a show he wanted, not of the sort Cuthbert meant. There had been times before - many and many-a time there had been - when he had, when he’d sat and watched and taken his pleasure equally from the sight of  _ their _ pleasure as from knowing that their lovemaking was on some level a performance put on for his sake. 

What he wanted, but did not understand how to say he wanted, was some piece of the private intimacy between the two of them. What he wanted was to see them when they thought they were unwatched, when they weren’t concerned with what he might want to see but simply absorbed in pleasing each other. Long ago, as a boy, he’d felt a species of bewildered jealousy that such a thing could have grown between the two of them without his knowing, that there could be something between them with no room for him. Now, as a man, he treasured the glimpses he got of the sweetness they’d made together, this thing that was apart from him but which they did not begrudge him.

Because he knew and felt those things in the parts of himself he rarely, if ever, looked into, and therefore could not say them, he simply shrugged and said, “This is plenty good enough for me.”

“Plenty good enough!” Cuthbert cried, as if he’d been mortally offended. “Plenty good enough  _ indeed _ .” 

He turned back to Alain for just a second, long enough for some unspoken communication to pass between them. Then he unfolded from his kneeling position over Alain’s lap and strode, unselfconsciously naked, across the room to where Roland stood. 

“I think we can do you a sight better than that, don’t you?” So saying, he grabbed Roland by the belt and yanked him forward, pressing tight against him and tilting his head back in a clear invitation.

It was an invitation Roland had no intention of refusing. He bent his head, closing the few inches between them, and kissed Cuthbert’s smiling mouth. Immediately, one of Bert’s hands slid into his back pocket, the other around the back of his head, and Bert’s clever tongue traced the bow of his lower lip and then slipped into his mouth.

Desire raced like wildfire through Roland. Every inch of his body came alive with tingling nerves, begging to be touched. He was desperately conscious of Cuthbert’s breasts pressed to his chest, high and small and pointed, of the hardness of his nipples even through the fabric of his own shirt; he was conscious of his own clothed erection pushing into Cuthbert’s smooth belly. He felt fully now the unfulfilled ache his last tryst with Allie had left, and no longer did he feel he could wait the night down watching. He wanted, he  _ needed _ to be touched, with an urgency that was almost frightening.

He ran his hands through Cuthbert’s black hair and let it fall, cool and sleek, between his fingers. He ran his hands over every inch of warm, bare skin that he could reach. He kissed Cuthbert deeply and fiercely, pulling back to take in a panting breath and then capturing his mouth once more, tongues and breath and soft half-vocalized noises traded back and forth between them like the tide.

At some point they turned, Roland barely aware of it. While they kissed, Cuthbert walked him back towards the bed, and he didn’t notice until the backs of his legs fetched up against it. Then Cuthbert pulled away, just enough to get his hands between them and go to work on Roland’s belt and the flies of his pants.

Alain reached up, took him around the hips and pulled him down into his lap. “I’m glad you decided to come by,” he murmured softly into Roland’s ear.

“You left the door unlocked,” Roland said dumbly. It was all he could think to say. He leaned back into Alain’s warm bulk and tilted his head over onto Alain’s shoulder, offering up his neck and jaw.

“I thought you might come. I wasn’t sure.” Alain mouthed at the shell of his ear, making him shiver, and then moved down along the chiseled line of his jaw. He rucked Roland’s shirt up and then, with a murmured word of cajolery, lifted it off him entirely. 

Cuthbert divested of his pants and boots with similar speed and crawled into bed, kneeling between his spread legs. “He thought you might wish some happy company to soothe your wounded heart, since your affair has come to such an inglorious end.”

Between the two of them, there was no space for the sense of bleak emptiness which had steadily grown in him since they’d arrived in Tull. There was only: Alain’s broad hands on his chest and belly, stroking his skin and gently tweaking his nipples; Cuthbert’s mouth on his and Cuthbert’s pointy little breasts in his hands, nipples stiff against his palms; the hot length of Alain’s hard cock sandwiched between his round belly and Roland’s back; the sound of their quick breathing and needful noises intermingled, until he could hardly tell which came from who. There was only their three bodies and his desire for them and his love for them, his recognition that on some level they had known he would need this.

“Lean back a little,” Cuthbert said after a time, breathing hard. “I want to ride you.” 

Alain shifted lower on the bed, the wooden frame and headboard groaning ominously as he did, and lifted Roland with an effortless strength that sent a dizzy thrill of arousal shooting through him. Roland reclined back against him, his own slim legs spread inside the wide V of Alain’s, and watched Cuthbert kneel over him, straddling both of them to do it.

“You two don’t half keep a fellow limber,” Cuthbert remarked. He reached down to grasp the base of Roland’s cock, steadying him, aiming him, and sank slowly down on him, eye fluttering shut as he did, sighing out a low laugh. His body welcomed Roland’s cock in like an old friend; he was sopping wet and deliciously hot and the feel of him was achingly familiar. Like coming home, like coming in from the cold.

Roland dropped his head back against Alain’s shoulder and groaned deep in his throat. He trembled all over, as if in the grip of a fever. He reached out to touch Cuthbert, stroking up the length of his long lean legs and feeling the muscles there work as he raised and lowered himself, clutching at the sharp angle of his hips and trying to make him move faster. He dug his heels into the mattress for leverage, trying to thrust up, trying to make a rhythm of his own.

“No, none of that now,” Cuthbert said, breathless and amused. “You just let me take care of you, alright?” And the angle at which Roland was being held back against Alain mostly meant that was what he had to do. 

He watched Cuthbert moving on him, and when he couldn’t stand to watch that anymore he turned his head to kiss Alain. Sloppy though it was at that angle, neither of them cared. Alain moaned into Roland’s mouth, low and resonant, as Roland squirmed against him. When he came it was with a desperate gasping groan, and a spurt of wet heat up Roland’s back. Cuthbert loosed a high, needy moan at the sound, hips working faster.

“Cuthbert,” Roland said warningly when he felt his own climax approaching, not long after. It was hard to speak, hard to make his pleasure-soaked brain and dumb gasping mouth form words. “I’m - Bert -”

“Go on then,” Cuthbert urged him, and leaned in to kiss away any further attempt to speak. “Go on -” this whispered in a hot warm breath of sound against his lips - “come in me, I want you to, I want to feel it, go on -”

That was all the encouragement he needed. Roland came convulsively, writhing between his two friends, one hand wrapped around Cuthbert’s skinny hip and the other buried in Alain’s hair. Cuthbert rode him through it and then laid against him, a comforting weight, and lazily kissed at the corner of his mouth.

For a time there was silence between them, save for their breathing. Roland could have drifted happily off to sleep then - did start drifting, in fact, until he felt Cuthbert slip a hand between them, down to the place where they were still joined, and his addled mind realized what Bert was doing.

He took Cuthbert by the shoulders. “Lay back.” It was still hard to get words out, though not so much as it had been. 

Cuthbert raised his eyebrows but lay obediently back, still idly touching himself. “Are you aiming to go for a second round? At your age, Ro? I can’t complain, but I wouldn’t recommend - oh!”

The flow of his words cut off when Roland put his mouth on him. The hand he’d been working at himself with slid into Roland’s hair instead. He was very close; Roland could tell that from the taut hardness of his clit and the way he started squirming and breathlessly laughing right away.

Roland didn’t care much for the taste of his own spend, but he did care for the hand pulling in his hair and the way Cuthbert hooked one long leg over his shoulder and the desperate noises he was making, the way he kept gasping  _ Oh, Roland  _ over and over again. That he cared for very much.

It took only a couple of minutes of suckling and licking at him before Cuthbert shuddered in climax below him, thighs squeezing tight against the sides of his head. When Roland raised his head from between his legs, Cuthbert propped himself up shakily on his elbows and looked down the length of his body at him, his single eye so dark and wide it was impossible to tell iris from pupil. 

Roland placed a delicate kiss on the inside of one thigh, then sat up, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth.

The bed was far too small for the three of them, but they made do, and Roland slept better that night than he had - or would - for a long time.


	4. Chapter 4

Two days past the last dweller’s hut, the desert spread before them. No expanse of dunes and soft, shifting sands, this desert; it was a flat span of sun-baked hardpan, gritty and crumbling. The hot, fitful breeze spattered handfuls of dust against their boots. 

The shimmering heat waves made it seem almost to breathe, like some vast animal waiting patiently to rise and swallow them whole.

Roland stood at the edge and looked out into the desert like a man on a ledge staring down a hundred feet of empty air. Sweat rolled down his face and stuck his shirt to his skin. The air was dry and flat in his throat.

He had called a halt but now could not find the words he meant to say. The idea had been in him as far back as Tull, he supposed, percolating through the undercellar of his mind until it was fully formed enough to be thought. As they’d traveled farther into the desert, he had become more sure.

Finally they had reached some invisible line past which he knew: he must cross the desert alone.

Was it ka? It comforted him to think it might be so. Cuthbert called ka mankind’s great whipping boy, always there to take the blame for whatever mistakes one might make. There was, Roland had to admit, a great comfort in ceding one’s actions over to that irresistible force. Ka, like a wind. Might it be so? It might indeed.

He was not a man given much to self-reflection, but he knew enough of himself to suspect the greater part of it was impatience, and that was what shamed him enough to still his tongue.

That - and the fear. He was afraid of the desert. Even moreso, he was afraid of crossing it alone. The great arid beast stretched before him would swallow him whole, of that he was almost certain, and spit back out not so much as a scrap of cloth or a splinter of bone. He could no more turn aside and cry off than he could still the beating of his own heart; it did not even occur to him to think of doing so. Here his quarry had gone, and here he would follow. It did, however, occur to him to fear his own looming death.

Plainly put, the issue was Alain. Once upon a time they’d had mounts, but those days were long gone, and it was now a simple fact that he slowed them down.

He did as well as he could. He never complained. Roland could only guess at how much it had to hurt him to walk the countless miles they’d walked, at how much pain he swallowed daily. Alain’s stolid face was like the calm water of a deep well; a man might see five or ten or even twenty feet down, but below that all was dark and any manner of things could be hidden.

On the roads, with towns to track their progress by, it hadn’t mattered so much. But if they lost the man in black’s trail in the featureless desert - if he got over the mountains too far ahead - 

Roland had never been so close to his quarry. The knowledge beat like a second heart in his chest. On his own, he could catch up. 

With Cuthbert at his side, he could catch up, even - but neither of them would send Alain alone into the desert. He’d go, Roland knew, and not say a word against it. Slow or not, he might well be better suited to survive it than either of his friends, at that. But neither of them would even think of it, because they knew it was their fault. 

Whose shot had taken Alain in the knee that night before the battle of Jericho Hill - whose bullet had given him a twisted crater of scar tissue and splintered bone fragments where once a healthy joint had been - they would never know. Privately, Roland was sure it was his. Doubtless Cuthbert carried the same conviction.

Either way, the fact remained: it was their fault. And Cuthbert would no more let Alain go alone into the wasteland before them than Roland would suggest it.

“My friend,” Cuthbert said from beside him, clapping a hand onto his shoulder, “do you intend simply to stare at it until we’re all glare-blind? Have you decided to turn back, perhaps? That fellow with the bird would put us up for the night again, I wager, even if we haven’t a mule to feed him any longer, and mayhap if we go back far enough the way we came we’ll come around the other side and catch our man up from the front, eh? They do say the world is round.”

“No,” Roland said. His voice croaked out of his throat like a spurt of rusty water from a long disused pump. He worked his mouth, swallowed what meager bit of spit his thirsty body could produce, and turned to face his friends.

His dearest, oldest friends, the last remaining sons of Gilead. Without them he might well have gone mad. He looked at them and tried to fix the memory of their faces - Alain’s round and red, Cuthbert’s narrow and fine-featured and grinning - in his mind as firmly as was fixed the face of his father. He felt very strongly that he might never see them again. Coward that he was, though, he did not ask Alain, whose touch might well have told him the truth of it.

“We will cross,” he told them. “For the man in black is in this desert, not so far ahead of us. Can you scent him on the wind?”

“Aye,” said Cuthbert. “So what are we waiting for?” Still grinning, but a hard grin, one that knew Roland had something unpleasant to say.

Alain simply looked at him, steady, serene. He knew, Roland decided. How could he not? Perhaps he’d known that last night in Tull. Perhaps he’d left the door unlocked so Roland would come and give the three of them one last good moment together to remember.

“Here we part ways.” Roland held a hand up to forestall Cuthbert’s protest. “I have thought long on it, and I speak to you now as dinh. I will follow him direct, and I will go alone, for by myself I can be after him most quickly. The two of you I charge to find your own way. Northwest or southwest, whichever you think is best. Go around and cut him off, and we will meet again on the other side of the mountains.”

Cuthbert looked at Alain, whose expression had not changed, and then back at Roland, his single eye flatly accusing. “You would send us away from you this close to our quarry?”

“Even better might be to split up all three, and go after him all ways, just to be certain. I send us apart so that where one might fall or falter, two can go on, and so that one may travel where two cannot. I send you so that we have the best chance of catching him. This I tell you as dinh, Cuthbert son of Robert. Do you hear me?”

“You send us apart -” Cuthbert started, hotly. 

Alain put a hand on his shoulder, forestalling the flood of words, and said softly, “He sends us apart for the reason he says, Bert. Do you doubt the word of your own dinh?”

Cuthbert stared at him for a long moment, then let loose a faintly disgusted sigh. He put his fist to his heart and bowed his head. “Hear you very well,” he muttered grudgingly to the ground.

Then he stuck his leg out, planted his heel, and made a deeper bow. “Long days and pleasant nights, Roland.”

Alain made a leg and bowed as well, wavering not a bit over his outstretched lame leg. “I hear you very well. Long days and pleasant nights.”

Roland returned the gesture. “May you have twice the number.” Then he embraced them both, and kissed their sun-hot cheeks. “We will meet again. I swear it on my father’s name.”

And there they parted. Roland did not watch his friends’ forms fade into the shimmering heat-soaked distance. He could not have borne it. Instead he turned his face to the direction of his prey.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are, at the end of the beginning of this ambitious project! We'll have a bit of a non-canonical interlude between this and the Drawing rewrite, and then Drawing itself, which is done.
> 
> As you can see, I've elected to cut a lot of material from The Gunslinger. The way I see it is this: if you wanted to read Stephen King's Dark Tower series, you could pick up the books that he wrote and read them. If you're reading this fanfiction, you want to see something new.
> 
> The premise of this AU is that two characters who canonically died long before the events of the series take place are alive and along for the ride, and the focus of this fic is going to be on how their presence changes things.
> 
> To that end, I will largely be cutting scenes that can't be told from a new POV or that I feel don't add anything new or communicate important plot or characterization information.
> 
> I have and will continue to take various other liberties with Mr. King's work, though none, I think, too grievous, especially given the nature of the canonically established infinite multiverse.
> 
> I hope you've all enjoyed the fic up until now and that you'll come along with me for the rest of it! Your comments, kudos, and questions are greatly appreciated.


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